A management system may include functionalities that are designed to monitor and track relationships, in the forms of models, among logical and physical resources of a computing environment. These relationship models may provide a priori knowledge of how resources within the computing environment are interconnected. The management system may use these relationship models to reduce management activities, and simplify troubleshooting procedures, when errors occur. For example, a relationship model may provide information regarding the connectivity of a set of devices to the rest of the infrastructure via a switch, and information regarding the effect on the devices when the switch is rendered inoperable, e.g., all devices connected to the switch create alarms. The management system may use this relationship information to suppress the noise (e.g., the multiple alarms created by all of the affected devices) and to provide information that indicates that the switch is inoperable.
However, in today's large, dynamic and (often) cloud-based environment, the inter-entity relationship/interaction model becomes expensive and difficult to maintain and it is also frequently difficult or impossible to anticipate all possible dependencies that might arise. Conventional management systems may only provide basic management functionalities with minimal aid of machine intelligence, in the form of static rules, e.g., previously known static relationships. Because infrastructures are poised to grow exponentially, administrators' inability to effectively manage them becomes more amplified.